I was inside my house for what seemed a long time before I heard Ralph’s horn telling me that there was some kind of honour among thieves, that Mr Smith had really left my farm lorry where he said he would. I cleared the table and washed and put away the cups and plates, and then I started the generator and hoovered everywhere throughout the house, pulling a lost pair of Jules’s socks from behind the sofa in our office and finding a favourite old jumper of his stuffed between the mattress and box springs of the bed in our room. I started out slowly, since I intended to do only a light cleaning, but soon I altered my intentions, going several times to the storage shed for mops and buckets and a stiff-bristled brush. I moved the furniture from the living room to the verandah and when the floor was washed and shining I moved everything back inside again.
When our bedroom was as clean as the room in the front I took two suitcases from the cupboard in the spare room and packed Jules’s clothing into them, leaving only his recently found jumper on the top of the bed. I locked the suitcases, carried them out to the dormitory, and threw them into one of the empty rooms. After that I took the occasional chairs from my verandah and scrubbed the whitewashed boards. I refilled my bucket and washed all of the windows of my house, both inside and out, noticing as I did so that the sun was going, that most of the day was gone.
After everything but my body was as clean as I could make it, I got into our shower and washed myself too, and before I dried and dressed again I washed the bathroom walls and polished the fixtures until their dullness disappeared. There is such peace in mindlessness, in the unthoughtful passage of time. I had worked for half a dozen hours before the sun went down.
I was in my living room and wearing a clean pair of trousers, with Jules’s old jumper on over them and that little tusk of mine in my hand. I sat down on the freshly aired sofa and put the tusk on the table and looked at it from the distance of three feet or so. Here was the crux of the matter, the symbol of all that was at hand.
“Should I dig up your brothers and sisters?” I said aloud.
The sound of my voice in the room was startling. When last I’d spoken, it was in farewell to that stunned quartet, and ever since then, all during my marathon cleaning, the intrusion of words would not have been welcome. The moment after I spoke I felt as if something had moved in the house.
“Who’s there?” I asked, but, of course, there was no one. I was alone on my farm, just as I was alone in the world at large, with others passing through my life to visit, but with no one staying long. This, I understood, was practise for the years to come.
I stood and carried the tusk along with me as I locked the windows I’d cleaned, but when I got to the front door, though my intention was to lock it too, I somehow opened it and stepped outside, reaching back in to turn the generator off. Now I was in a natural darkness as complete as any human being had ever known. The stars were out and there was a moon, which looked at me through a squinting eye, but there was no artificial light, nothing from Narok and nothing from the house, and there was no lit fire anymore, by which I could sit to stir the memories of what this day had brought me or of what my earlier life had been.
I walked out to the mid-point between the house and the pond, thinking of the false nature not of man-made light anymore but of humans in the natural world. Suddenly I took Jules’s jumper off, and then the rest of my clothes. I was the same colour as the moonlight, milky on the dark path, and since I was still holding the tusk in my hand, I raised it up and turned it until its shape conformed to that of the moon. It seemed a perfect fit, as if this man-made tusk could fill the hole in the sky, and I thought that if only I were tall enough and could place it there, then artifice would triumph and everything would turn truly dark and I would die.
When I put my arm back down and came to my normal senses once again, I looked toward the pond and was astonished to see a female elephant there. She was on the pond’s far side and must have been there all along, since I hadn’t heard her come. I must have been an odd vision, unclothed and glowing in my moonlit skin, for when the elephant saw my eyes her pinned-back ears came forward again, like kites dancing out, and then her hind legs bent and she turned on them, lunging into the bush behind her, crashing through the underbrush like a runaway lorry off a road. She’d run as soon as I’d noticed her—wasn’t that strange? Was this the fear of a grieving mother at the sight of a grieving wife?
The surprise of seeing the elephant made me drop the little tusk, so I fell to my knees as soon as she was gone, oddly worried that I mightn’t be able to find it again. And once I felt the coolness of the ground I stayed there for a while. I had a vision of the elephant before me, her living tusks dancing in the distance like two white Maasai gourds or like the moon unblocked of its ivory plug. I found the tusk beside me and held it tight, and then I let all my muscles go, stretching out, staring up, and feeling the earth beneath me, heavy and solid and wide. I will stay the whole night through, I thought, with only this unsharp tusk to protect me should trouble come my way. I thought of my father for a minute but chased him from my mind. I thought of Jules in his coffin on the back of that lorry with Detective Mubia’s burned body by his side. I listened for the leaving elephant, but her sound was long gone, and when I looked at the sky, a dark cloud had covered the little moon, as if to protect it from any more meddling by me.
I was alone on the surface of the planet, the masthead of my ship, pushing into unchartered space. Suddenly I seemed to know that this was how Jules had felt too. Superimposed on my body I could feel his own, complete with its shredded arm and its wide-open, bullet-torn wound. I could see the land around me and the pond and the house and the dormitory, and I felt my body move and I knew that this was the agonised way in which Jules had moved only ten short nights before. I was at the exact spot where Jules had fallen, I knew it now, and the moon was as dark now as it was then, and I was as free of pain as Jules had been and as ambivalent about whether or not to go on. I could see it all, whether in my mind’s eye or from the elevated height at which my husband still hovered, I do not know, but I was Jules on the ground with the little elephant’s tusk suddenly stuck between my legs to prove it, not burrowing in this time but standing up tall like the carved phallus on a primitive doll. I could see that my breasts were flattened and that the light from a re-emerging moon made the muscles of my arms and legs look wrong, moving me manward and back again like an optical illusion, a creature designed through cataracts on the eyes of God.
The moment was strong and I gave in to it, unafraid and sure that from all this misery I was finally learning a universal truth of some kind, when abruptly I was just as sure that Jules had fled and the devil had come. Where before the breeze had cleansed me, now it was thick with the choking smell of feces and urine and burning flesh. It was as if I’d been captured by the evil in the night because I had not been watching for it, as if a blanket of hot and rancid air had been thrown over me to keep me warm.
I grabbed the tusk from its resting place and leapt to my feet and shouted “No!” And when I thrust the tusk at the devil’s horrid head I so startled him that he jumped away, fell on his haunches, and twisted around, as the elephant had, to run. This devil had thought I was dead and was there to retrieve my soul. This devil was a big hyena, alert and hungry, come to sniff me out.
I snatched up the clothes I had worn and hurried back to the house, since the hyena’s retreat might only be momentary. I closed the door and locked it and put my back to it and then I turned and pulled the shade down too. From the front room window, where I crouched and peeked, I could see the hyena again, standing where I had been, smelling the ground and laughing like Mr Smith, and looking at the house.
While the hyena was out there I didn’t want to move, and the hyena was out there for a good long time. My eyes were near the bottom of the window, peering over the top of the sill, and then they were down a little, surfacing occasionally periscope style, and then they were watching the ceiling, for I was lying down, safe this time, across my spotless wooden floor. When the hyena left, probably because he’d forgotten why he’d come, I didn’t know it, and it wasn’t until I heard a knocking on the shaded front door that I knew anything at all. It was morning and when I looked out, naked but rested in my immaculate home, I found Ralph standing there.
Whatever had happened the night before, whether I had encountered my husband or only hallucinated my way into a nearly deadly meeting with a hungry animal, it was all gone now. Only ordinary worries were reflected in Ralph’s glassy face and harried eyes.
“I’ve been cleaning here,” I said. “Give us a moment and I’ll let you in.”
Ralph didn’t move away from the window, so I did, slipping quickly into the same clothing I had worn the night before. And when I opened the door I told him to take off his shoes.
There was no dirt on Ralph’s feet but he did as I asked and while he was doing it I stepped briefly onto the verandah again, to make sure that the hyena wasn’t still hiding nearby. He wasn’t, but my knickers were there, folded neatly on the top of a chair. Ralph saw me see them and shrugged.
“I was worried about you,” he told me. “I walked over from the main Narok-Nakuru road. Those things came tumbling up to meet me when I entered your yard.”
Ralph said the Cooleys had urged him to come back, so he’d asked a friend, a Cottar’s Camp man, to drive his van for him, taking them on the rest of their safari and then bringing them back to Nairobi when it was done. He also said he saw Detective Mubia’s station wagon, still on the Narok-Nakuru road, but a hollowed-out shell, burned far worse than his legs had been.
Ralph wanted me to be glad he was there, he wanted me to see ordinary human concern in his presence, and in the insistence of Dorothea and Michael and John that he come. I saw it, but it couldn’t make me glad, and strangely, instead of turning me friendly, Ralph’s presence turned me inward again. It made me remember Mr Smith and it re-engaged me in the puzzle of defeating him, of evening the score one last time. There were murderers and grave robbers in my world, yet civilised human beings wanted me to tell them I was fine. I was not fine. And, in a word, Ralph’s kindness and the kindness of strangers on whom I would never lay eyes again continued to make me mad.